Bath

After Salisbury, we went to Bath.  There are two main tourist attractions in Bath: the old Roman Bath, built on a natural hot spring, and the Thermae Bath Spa, that also draws from the hot spring.  There are other things as well, of course.  It's a nice, old town, with restaurants and museums.  I particularly liked this bridge:

Google Goggles tells me that this is the Pulteney Bridge.  It's lined with shops on either side. Google didn't recognize Kristin, but I think that's a good thing.

There are also some famous, and scenic, neighborhoods:

The Royal Crescent, in Bath. Also, the back of Kristin's head.

The Circus in Bath.  That's Kristin to the right.

But the baths--ancient and modern--were the main reason we went.

The ancient baths are the best preserved Roman baths in the world.  They were built on top of a natural hot spring, and thus have a very unusual Great Bath--a large pool of hot water:

The Great Bath, with tourists.  There was a roof in ancient times.  It's open to the air today.

They also have the more typical baths from the Roman era: the caldarium, which was the hottest bath and more of a sauna, though it did sometimes have a small, hot pool; the tepidarium, or warm room, which usually didn't have any water; and the frigidarium, or cold pool.

The Caldarium, or rather, the stacks of tiles that held up the floor.  Hot air ran through this area (called a hypocaust) to heat the room above.

The tepidarium, or warm room

The frigidarium, or cold pool.

We also went to the modern day Thermae Bath Spa.  We figured that this was as close as we could get to the experience of the Roman baths. There's a large warm pool, several saunas, and a warm, rooftop pool.  There was no cold pool, and to be honest, the warm pool was more characteristic of the special setup at Bath rather than the typical Roman path, and of course, everyone was wearing swimsuits, but it was the best we could do.  They didn't let us take pictures inside, so you'll have to check out the Thermae Bath Spa website to see what it looks like inside.

After Bath, Kristin and I went back to London for a day, and then on to home in Boston, where we're currently recovering from jetlag.

Salisbury

We spent Thursday through Monday in Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention. As most of that time was spent at the Con, going to panels and parties and the Dealer's room, and I neglected to take much in the way of pictures, I'll just skip to the next part of the trip: Salisbury.

One of the neatest things about our trip was the hotel we were staying in.  It was built in the 14th century, and we were staying in one of the suites in the older part of it:

The suite in Salisbury

Kristin in the hallway outside the suite

An old door, with gryphons.

The construction of the walls of the inn, underneath the white plaster.  This is, I believe, wattle and daub construction.

We went to Salisbury because we wanted to see Stonehenge and some of the other historical sites in the area. Stonehenge proved to be less exciting than I had hoped. Pretty much the only thing to do there was to walk in a circle around Stonehenge (without getting too close), and take pictures. And frankly, after you've taken a picture from every conceivable angle, there just isn't much left to do. There's a free audio guide, but the only plaques are numbers to use on your audio guide. Personally, I hate audio guides, and would rather have something to read, but as that wasn't an option, I kind of regret not taking the guide. In any case, here are some pictures from Stonehenge:

Stonehenge

Stonehenge again.

Yet more Stonehenge

The heelstone at Stonehenge.

We also went to Old Sarum. This is the original town that Salisbury grew out of, which dates back to an Iron Age hill fort, later used by the Romans and then the English kings. However, the secular authorities of the castle at Old Sarum got into a feud with the Bishop of the Cathedral in Old Sarum, and the bishop requested, and got, permission to build a new cathedral, well away from the town of Old Sarum. A new town grew up there, and as the English monarchy used Old Sarum less and less, New Sarum became Salisbury, while Old Sarum died. But, pictures:

Leading up to the location of the old castle

The view of the remains of the tower and castle from the wall

The remains of the Old Sarum cathedral.

The new Salisbury Cathedral can be seen in the distance.  It's the tallest church spire in England.

After looking at Old Sarum, we visited the Salisbury Cathedral, and saw what was built after the old Cathedral was left behind:

The view of the spire from the cathedral's courtyard.

Inside the cathedral.

Also inside the cathedral.

A model of Old Sarum, including the old cathedral, inside the Salisbury Cathedral.

Update: (11/8/2013): Added a picture of the Heelstone, which I couldn't find before.

New Review up

My latest review is up at Black Gate. This month, it's The Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Chronicles by D.P. Prior.  To quote myself:

I have a soft spot for dwarves. I consider elves over-used Mary Sues and I could go another decade or two without reading another story about fairies, but give me short smiths with beards and axes who drink too much and I’ll keep reading. Which brings us to this month’s self-published book: The Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Chronicles. This wasn’t a book that the author submitted to me by my normal process: I’ll get back to those next month. This time, I actually bought the book from Amazon for actual money, because hey, it was about a dwarf.

London Holiday

Kristin and I are in the UK for the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.  The convention starts tomorrow, and in the meantime, we've been in London doing the tourist thing.  Being who we are, this has meant not Big Ben and the Tower of London, but the Science Museum, the Classics wing of the British Museum, and Verulamium near St. Albans.

We're staying in a hotel room which is very modern, but rather small:

Kristin on her phone in the hotel room

The very narrow bathroom

All the lights in the hotel room appear to be LEDs, from the ceiling lights, to the stars overhead, and the blue highlights and the television accents:

Blue highlights and star-studded ceiling

The television has a nice glow behind it.

And, of course, there's a collection of inputs for the television, in case you want to show something through HDMI, VGA, RCA, or any other connection.

Connections for the television.  I'm using the USB to charge my phone.

I'm afraid that I didn't take any pictures at the Science Museum, which is too bad.  There was a fairly nice exhibit on steam power, with a huge, working steam engine.  I'm sure all the steampunk writers at World Fantasy would enjoy it.

Kristin and I were focused on the Roman exhibits at the British Museum.  I have more pictures than is practical of that part, but here are a few:

Cooking utensils in the ancient world

A body chain, one of the few examples of this Classical type of jewelry

Weapons!

The Portland Vase

I took a lot more pictures, of a lot of different things, mostly for reference in my writings.

We also went to Verulamium, which was one of the big Roman towns in the early years of Britain's induction to the Empire.  They had a pretty nice museum as well.  Much smaller than the British Museum, and very kid friendly with a lot of annoying multimedia presentation, but there were some interesting items, including the reconstruction of a number of rooms to try to show daily life:

Preparing food in a "middle class" kitchen

A door latch--I've been trying to figure out how exactly it worked

A hearth for preparing food

There are also a few excavation sites nearby:

Part of Verulamium's wall

What's left of the theater

A mosaic floor with a hypocaust--an underground heating system

Today, we went to see St. Paul's Cathedral.  They wouldn't let us take pictures inside, but we were able to take some outside:

The front of St. Paul's, distorted since I was using the panorama mode of my phone.

The dome

A picture from the top of the dome,  looking down on the towers in the first picture.  It required climbing a lot of stairs. 

That's all for now.  Tomorrow, we're heading for Brighton and the World Fantasy Convention.

T-shirts

For our anniversary in May, Kristin and I designed matching T-shirts.

They are now available for sale, in an array of styles and colors.

I won't ruin the joke by explaining it, but I will give a hint.

LED bulbs

I've recently been buying LED lightbulbs to replace the various bulbs we usually use around here. For a while, my wife was buying CFL bulbs, but she got tired of them, not so much for the quality of the light, but for the fact that their odd shapes and sizes kept them from fitting where she wanted them. So she's been buying the energy-efficient incandescents instead. These use a small amount of halogen (usually flourine or bromine) inside the bulbs, resulting in a chemical reaction which redeposits the tungsten evaporated by the bulb onto the filament, which allows the bulb to be operated at a higher temperature, where it has better efficiency. Most of which I learned from the Wikipedia entry.

The halogen incandescents are only very slightly more efficient than regular incandescents, though, and the GE ones, at least, are also dimmer than the bulbs they're supposed to replace. The 60 W replacements consume 43 W to produce 750 lumens rather than the standard 800 lumens, while the 100 W replacements consume 72 W to produce 1490 lumens rather than the standard 1600 lumens. Meanwhile, I can buy LED light bulbs that consume 9.5 W and produce 850 lumens, or 19 W and produce 1680 lumens. In math terms, they consume a quarter of the power and produce about 15% more light than the energy efficient incandescents.

I've long believed that LEDs were probably the light bulb of the future. They're more efficient than incandescents or CFLs, and last longer--twenty years, by standard measurements (which, unfortunately, don't actually involve waiting twenty years and seeing if they still work).

The problem is that LEDs cost commensurately more. I can buy decent quality 60 W equivalent LED bulbs for $10-20 apiece, or spend $2.50 for an energy efficient incandescent. And as for 100 W bulbs--not that long ago, you couldn't buy 100 W equivalent LED bulbs at any price. That's changed, but they're still expensive: $50 or more usually, though I have found a few available for $30 apiece. 100 W energy efficient incandescents? About $2.50 each for those too. Sure, the LEDs also have a 20 year lifespan, compared to the one year of the incandescents, but then again, LED prices are coming down pretty quickly, so buying incandescents this year and buying LEDs a year from now would probably save money in hardware costs. Not, though, when combined with electricity costs. So my compromise is to replace the bulbs we use the most--kitchen, living room, bedroom, with LEDs, and leave the rest for a little while.

LEDs in the living room's candelabra

One of the problems I've run into doing that is that a lot of pre-existing light fixtures in our apartment use the candelabra bulbs, and finding LEDs for those is more difficult--escpecially since it takes a lot more of them to fill the light fixture (6, in the case of the two we have in the living room and dining room), and they're about the same price as 60 W bulbs. Fortunately, I have found a fairly cheap option from Feit--a three bulb pack for $21. These actually work pretty well. They have a slightly higher color temperature at 3000 K (which means they're slightly more white than the yellowish incandescents), but they are close enough for us. We get 300 lumen for 4.8 Watts out of them. I have noticed that they turn on a bit slower--most of them seem to take half-a-second to come to life after flicking on the switch, which is usually something you see in CFLs, not LEDs. And one of the sockets won't work for any of the Feit LEDs for some reason--I had to use a LED from another company (one of the ones costing $10-20). But it works. And it seems to be just as bright as the fixture in the dining room, where I'm still using all (non high efficiency) incandescents.

The incandescents in the dining room.

In the kitchen, we have a five light fixture which takes normal sized 60 W bulbs. Two of them have CFLs which my wife put in a while ago, and since they seem to be working well, I haven't bothered replacing them. The rest I've replaced with LEDs, all from the Cree 60 W replacements. These have the right size, even if they're a bit oddly shaped.

The one on the left is the old style Cree 60 W, while the one on the right is the Cree TW 60 W.

I've tried both the older Cree bulb, and the Cree TW, which is supposed to have better color. I think the color of the TW bulb is a bit better, but as it's also more expensive ($18.50 vs. $12.50), and it also consumes more power (13.5 W vs 9.5 W). I think that the older bulb is a better purchase. It can be found at Home Depot, in packs of 6 (or less, for a slightly higher price), though it looks like that may not last for much longer.

I have yet to buy any 100 W bulbs. I bought a 75 W bulb from Sylvania at Amazon, but at $38 it was pretty expensive. Still, it works pretty well, and it appears to be brighter than the 100 W equivalent CFL which it replaced. That may simply be because the light is less omnidirectional, and while it produces only 1100 lumen, more of it is in the direction I want, while the 1600 lumen CFL sends more light up and to the sides.  Or it could just be that I didn't wait long enough for the CFL to reach full brightness--but if it takes more than a couple of seconds, that's an advantage for the LEDs.

100 W equivalent LEDs are mostly above $50, but at $30 apiece, this set of two seems more reasonable. I'm a little bit reluctant to buy them before I see some more reviews. They seem different from the usual orange Philips LEDs, and I'd like to know why. I've also spent a good bit on LEDs recently, and these, while cheaper, are still expensive. They're also larger bulbs, matching the large size A21 bulb, rather than the usual A19. There are places where they can fit, but they're too big for a lot of our fixtures.

I think I'll wait a month or so before buying any more LEDs, and then I'll probably buy more of the Feit candelabra bulbs, the Cree 60 W bulb, and the Philips 100 W bulbs.

Update (10/13/2013): I was clearing out my pictures on Google+, and accidentally deleted the pictures I had here.  I've replaced most of them, but I've changed the text so it's not as dependent.

New card

So I've created a new writing/blogging business card, just in time for the World Fantasy Convention:

New business card.

The picture is one I took when Kristin and I visited Italy for our honeymoon.  That's the Second Temple of Hera at Paestum. I felt it appropriate for my frequently Roman-themed stories.

The reason for the new card is that I also had a new role to advertise, that of a book reviewer at Black Gate. Since I'm reviewing self-published books, I thought it might be good if my card had that information to hand out.

Co-writing

On and off, my wife and I have talked about co-writing a story. We're both published writers, but we have noticeably different strengths and weaknesses. It seems like a co-written story might be able to combine our strengths and cover our weaknesses. And hopefully not the other way around. One problem I'm running into is figuring out how. How do two authors write a story together? I have a few ideas, but nothing's really seemed like it's the right way. Then again, there may not be a right way.

Here are the ideas:

1. Alternating revisions. What if just one person wrote the first draft, and the next person revised it? "How's that different than editing?" you ask. Complete creative freedom. The reviser isn't limited to line edits. They can make whatever changes they see fit. Deleting scenes, writing new ones, changing the entire course of the story. Of course, at that point, the story is returned to the first author, and he's free to make whatever changes he wants. At some point the two authors are going to have to negotiate, but at least at the beginning they're free to do whatever they want.

2. Alternating writing.  A lot of writing groups have done the exercise where the first person writes a paragraph, then hands it to the next person, who reads the first paragraph and then writes the next one. If you've done it, you've probably seen how quickly the exercise goes off the rails. Someone will write something the next person finds absurd, and soon everything up to that point becomes a dream or a daydream. So first, you probably shouldn't do it by paragraph. It would work better if you do it by scene. You also have to set some ground rules.  Like what type of story it should be,  no retconning without permission, that sort of thing. In theory it could work.

3. Joint Outlining. I have a feeling that this is the most common way of co-writing.  Two people sit down and come up with a story: the characters, the plot, the setting, etc. And then once it's planned out, they split up the work between them. This is probably the most effective way to do it.

4. Backseat writing. You literally write it together. One person looks over the other's shoulder as they type into the computer. I've done that, usually for work, and it's really slow and not much fun. It generally means debating word choice for every little thing. I can imagine that many projects will require some of this, but I can't imagine writing a whole story this way.

Any other ideas?

New review

I've just posted my latest review at Black Gate.  This month I review Thomas Alexander's Mistress of the Dancing Bones.

The War Against the Squirrels

My wife has been fighting the most wily and dangerous enemy of her gardening career.  She woke up with a cold on Monday morning, feeling sick and coughing. But that was a minor nuisance compared to the calamity that struck later in the day.  The squirrels had gotten into her raised bed and destroyed much of it, including most of the recently planted seeds and some of the younger plants. Kristin had been using Cayenne pepper flakes to keep the squirrels out, but apparently one of them has developed a taste for it.  She threw the closest thing at hand at it (my cell phone charger) when she saw it in her garden, but by then the damage had been done.

The damage from day two of the great squirrel war. The red is from the now ineffective Cayenne pepper.

Since then, she and the squirrels have been dueling.  She's been trying something different every day, inspired by the dark secrets found in the murky depths of the Internet, or possibly just in her cold-drug-addled brain.  She's tried throwing rocks, she's tried shooting foam discs, she's tried garlic and chicken wire and most recently, ghosts.

Spooky ghosts to frighten squirrels

She's determined to drive the squirrels away, though I worry that she'll make them so accustomed to the spicy, garlicky food and spooky ambiance that they'll never eat at a bland, regular garden again.

Update (10/5/2013): One more photo:

Ghosts from above!

Review of World's End

A week ago, Kristin and I went to the movies and saw World's End. It was an entertaining movie.  Kristin sold it to me as "A bunch of friends go on a pub crawl, and killer robots show up."  I'd warn about spoilers here, but I doubt many folks will go to this movie expecting a comedy about a pub crawl.  But just in case, there will be more spoilers below.

...

...

...

Of course, even with Kristin's spoiler, it wasn't what I expected.  The movie's primarily about a guy named Gary King.  On the day he graduated high school, he and his friends went on a pub crawl through all 12 pubs in the town where they grew up.  They only made it through nine, and Gary's been stuck ever since.  All his friends grew up, got jobs, had families, but while he left the town, Gary never really grew up.  He doesn't have any job that we've seen, no family, and really nothing in his life.  Then he hits on the idea of finishing the crawl, and making it through all 12 pubs this time, as if that will let him restart his life, this time correctly.

So he dragoons his friends into joining his quest, mostly by lying, and sets out to visit his hometown.  But things have changed.  People aren't the way they used to be, and a sort of sameness has infected the pubs. If you're thinking, "oh, everyone must have been replaced by robots," then you've read as much sci fi as I have. But where the description fails is the killer part.  The robots--don't call them that, as they're offended by the term--don't see themselves as invaders.  Rather, they're here to bring humanity into the galactic civilization by changing them for the better.  Yes, this sometimes means replacing people by transferring their minds, with small improvements, into robot artificial bodies, but by using these replacements to improve society as a whole, the vast majority of people should simply adapt to the new society.  This premise, that the robots would prefer not to replace them, justifies the fact that Gary King and his friends continue their pub crawl, pretending to fit in, rather than just making a run for it.  That, and Gary's crazy.  Of course, it doesn't take long for that to break down, and soon the friends are running for their lives (though Gary keeps insisting, against everyone's better judgement, that they run in the direction of the next pub in the crawl).  For a plan to replace only a small fraction of the population, it sure seems like everyone's a robot.

One of the things I found most remarkable was how proficient at fighting everyone was.  Gary King and his friends plowed through dozens of robots with some impressive moves, especially considering that they were all roaring drunk at the time. Or maybe that was why their moves were so impressive.

Ultimately, Kristin, at least, felt that the ending didn't work.  It felt inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the story.  Personally, I didn't think that.  I thought that if you were going to call the movie World's End, you had to go apocalyptic by the finale.

Fire

This picture was taken about 5 pm on Tuesday from my office.

Smoke from a fire at the airport

The fire was apparently a fuel fire at the airport, according to the local news:

Crews quickly contained a two-alarm fire that was burning at a Logan Airport fuel farm Tuesday afternoon. Black smoke could be seen for miles from the fire on Prescott St. near the economy parking lot.

[. . .]

The fire was in one of 12 underground fuel pumps and started at 5:00pm.

The news article says that the fire was "quickly contained", and the picture I took just a few minutes after the first one, at 5:04pm, confirms it:

The fire is gone and the smoke is beginning to dissipate.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, and as far as anyone can tell, it was an accident. It was a little alarming seeing that out my window, though.

Review is up

My latest review for Black Gate is online.  This time I review Milton Davis's Woman of the Woods.

The gesture keyboard

This is more of a comment on Android than on my phone in particular, but I'm starting to get the hang of the gesture keyboard that Android uses. It's much faster than the hunt-and-peck method I'm used to. Still, I've seen people much more practiced than I use it, so I know I have a ways to go. That said, I am getting better at it. And it's surprisingly forgiving if you make a mistake, and need to change your direction in the middle of a stroke. Or even if you're not quite on target with your strokes. Give me a little more practice, and maybe I'll try writing a novel with it. I've already used it for a couple of flash fiction stories.

It's also gotten me to start holding the phone in portrait mode when I type. With my iPhone, I always used my phone held in landscape whenever I needed to type something, so that I could use both thumbs without needing to reach across the keyboard. With the gesture keyboard, it's actually easier to hold in portrait, since that makes the keyboard, and thus my gestures, smaller. My new phone also has a bigger screen than my iPhone, so the keys are big enough when held in portrait, and the gesture keyboard is forgiving enough, that I don't need to make the keyboard larger by holding it in landscape.  I haven't quite gotten the hang of doing the gestures one-handed with just my thumb, though. I can type that way, though it's more of a stretch with the larger screen, but it's hard to do the gestures.

Now all I need is Scrivener for Android, and I'll be set.